JOY McWATTERS was perhaps best known as a Fleet Streetjournalist in the 1950s and 60s. As woman’s editor of the Daily Express, she launched one of the first women’s pages under the byline Joy Matthews. But she was admired also for her tireless work in a number of other roles — society hostess, patron of the arts and charity worker.

Married very young, Joy was left a widow with one son and a living to earn in her early twenties. After trying her hand at advertising, she was recruited by the Daily Express in the mid-1950s. It was then a big, brash and confident broadsheet with a circulation of more than four million. Her women’s page, Feminascope, contained light-hearted articles on fashion, beauty and home-decorating trends, spiced with celebrity gossip and the occasional recipe. One of these, telephoned from Paris, nearly ended her career when the translator failed to convert the French “laurel” into the English “bayleaf”. The recipe was published with “one laurel leaf” as an ingredient. The National Poisons Unit at Guys immediately informed the editor that laurel leaves might be highly toxic, and the Daily Mirror issued a front-page warning the following day.

McWatters’s second marriage, to art dealer David Wolfers, ended in divorce after the birth of a severely handicapped son, and with the arrival of a new editor at the Express she lost her job there. Almost at once she was recruited by the Daily Mail to launch their new women’s section, Femail, but this new career was short-lived.

Early in 1960 she joined a press party led by the famous wine merchants Harveys of Bristol to visit their claret and champagne properties in France, and their bodega at Jérez in Spain. Lunches and dinners found Joy — the only woman in the party — always seated next to Harvey’s chairman, George McWatters. A few months later, in July 1960, they were married at St Columba’s Pont Street, and two years later their son Christopher was born.

Turning her back on journalism, she played hostess to a huge circle of important contacts and friends at a succession of beautiful London homes and at Burrington House near Bristol which they were then renting. She organised memorable parties: menus printed on white satin record the spectacular ball given in the big white ballroom of their Hamilton Terrace house for Harveys associates at Taittinger. McWatters herself was always a glamorous figure on these occasions.

She opened her own fashion boutique at 61 Park Lane, but for once she was too far ahead of the trend: the shop closed down just a year before designer boutiques such as Browns began to proliferate in Mayfair.

In 1965 Showerings, the makers of Babycham, took over Harveys and George resigned, taking up instead the directorship of the shoe-making company John White, which he ran until 1982. As founding chairman of HTV (formerly Harlech Television) his work next took them back to Bristol, where they bought Burrington House.

Once in Bristol, Joy was co-opted on to the board of directors of the Arnolfini Centre for the performing arts, today one of the most vibrant and progressive in Europe but in that time underfunded, undervalued and desperately in need of support.

Long before the term was invented, McWatters knew all about networking. Within weeks she had set up the Friends of Arnolfini to raise funds, and secured a roster of influential patrons. She threw lavish parties to publicise it and bullied, coaxed or charmed friends into offering their support.

Another adopted cause was that of music therapy, for which Leslie Bunt, founder of MusicSpace, was trying to set up a centre at the time. McWatters exploited all her contacts to help to establish a steering group. She co-opted a formidable list of patrons and, within the first year, had helped to raise more than £100,000.

As Names at Lloyds, along with thousands of others, George and Joy McWatters saw their fortunes annihilated in the mid-1990s. They were obliged to relinquish Burrington House and their wealthy lifestyle. Typically, McWatters took these reverses in her stride: they moved to Bath and she found a new cause to adopt. George’s cousin, Jeremy Fry, had bought Bath’s beautiful Theatre Royal in 1979 to operate as a registered charity, and it had met with hard times.

McWatters helped to raise £1 million and, until the end of her life, was its assiduous and generous patron. Her last public act was to organise a special fundraising evening in support of the new Egg Theatre for children within the Theatre Royal. She is survived by her husband, George, and by her three sons.

Joy McWatters, journalist, was born on December 26, 1922. She died on January 17, 2006, aged 83.